“It’s the Apartheid System We Have to Change”: An Interview with Shai Carmeli-Pollak (Web Exclusive)
by Mitchell Abidor

Shai Carmeli-Pollak’s The Sea won the 2025 Ophir, the Israeli equivalent of an Oscar, for Best Feature Film. Pollak has been making films for decades, though he took a long break to dedicate himself to activism after the Second Intifada. As part of the group Anarchists Against the Wall, he fought against the building of the separation wall on the West Bank, an experience he documented in all its cruelty and brutality in his film Bilin My Love (2006). He has also worked in support of African refugees in Israel, a group harassed, shunned, and mistreated by an unsympathetic government and largely indifferent public. This activism led to his making the film Refugees (2008), a tragic and heartbreaking portrait of a country of refugees that has turned its back on the mainly African refugees among them.

Viewing firsthand the plight of Palestinians left him, as he told me,  “creatively paralyzed.” He finally returned to film last year with The Sea. This placed him, he told me, in the odd situation of being viewed as “a beginning filmmaker” when he returned to make the film. “Much time and frustration,” he said, was required to make The Sea, a feature film about a young Palestinian boy who dreams only of seeing the sea, which is less than an hour from his home, but inaccessible to him because he lacks an entry permit for Israel. He sneaks across the border between the West Bank and Israel proper, where his father works illegally in construction. The Sea traces the paths of the father and son, as the boy tries to reach the beach in Tel Aviv, while the father tries to find his son before he can be arrested. The film makes its political point gently but unmistakably and, in its gentle humanism, it refuses to treat the Israelis the father and son meet as monsters. As he told me before I turned on the tape recorder, “I don’t accuse anyone of being a monster. It’s the apartheid system we have to change. It’s not this terrible government or that. It’s the system we’re born into.” Carmeli-Pollak’s winning the prize for Best Feature Film at the Ophirs caused violent criticism from Miki Zohar, the Israeli Minister of Culture and Sports, the long term effects of which—including cutting of funding for the awards ceremony, the changing of the formula for the distribution of government funds to filmmakers, and the threat to totally end funding—are detailed in the article “Israeli Filmmakers Between Boycott and Repression” in the Spring 2026 print issue of Cineaste.—Mitchell Abidor

Cineaste: What led you, an Israeli Jew, to make a film in which the characters are Palestinians, not Israelis? To use a phrase commonly thrown around here, were you afraid of being accused of cultural appropriation?

Shai Carmeli-Pollak: The protagonists are Palestinians, but I don’t think it’s only about Palestinians. The story is from the point of view of the child Khaled [played by Muhammad Ghazawi], and the father, Ribhi [played by Khalifa Natour], as well, but it’s not just a Palestinian story. I didn’t think about it; it all just came about in an organic way. I was an activist for many years and used to go to the West Bank to take part in demonstrations. This issue of longing to go to the sea, which is only an hour away, was always present in my conversations with Palestinians. As was the situation of the father, the issue of unemployment and the desperate need to get work in the West Bank or Israel, which requires a permit. It used to be possible to get a permit, but now it’s not, and people must sneak over the border. So, this story was in me, of a child who wants to go to the sea and of his father who goes to look for him, though it’s dangerous. I immediately thought it had a lot of cinematic potential.

Cineaste: It has the feeling of an Iranian film of the golden era, of Jafar Panahi’s The White Balloon [1995] and The Mirror [1997]. In fact, there’s even a kid in the background of some shots carrying a white balloon

Pollak: Those were two films I was influenced by; in both, the kids have this journey through the city. In The White Balloon, the father tells the kids to get him shampoo while he’s in the shower and you don’t see his face. I was really inspired by the father since in my film, like in Panahi’s, at the beginning you don’t see him, but only hear him on the phone. Then, in the next part of the film, you see the father and he’s not what you thought about him when he was only a voice. And, yes, I made this gesture of the kid carrying the white balloon. I remember I was shocked the first time I saw The Mirror, which I thought was amazing. It was a real inspiration. I thought about the journey of the girl in The Mirror, and how you see Tehran; you learn about the people as she asks for her way home, the same way you see Tel Aviv in The Sea. Another influence was De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves [1948].

Cineaste: Which was my next question…

Carmeli-Pollak: I watched it many years ago, when I was a film student, but it wasn’t something that was in my mind. Then I had a meeting with someone, a teacher of mine, about a script for a documentary, and he said, “You wrote a nice documentary, but it’s kind of boring. You need to watch Bicycle Thieves again.” It was so strong that I cried. I thought that if someone can make a film that can make you cry, well, I aspire to do the same, to make it universal, so that if someone watches it thirty years from now, they’ll be emotionally affected. Of course, in Bicycle Thieves the father and the son walk together all the time, but in The Sea they’re separated. I don’t want to talk about the end, since that would be a spoiler, but it was directly influenced by the end of Bicycle Thieves, when the father steals the bicycle and the people pursuing catch him, slap him in the face and humiliate him. Then, when they see he’s with his child, they let him go, and the son consoles the father, turning the relationship upside down. It was so powerful that I searched for a gesture like this that would be faithful to my film, and the moment when the father puts his hand on his son’s shoulder, and the policeman stops him and tells him to move away. I was very influenced by the gesture in Bicycle Thieves.

Cineaste: Tel Aviv is now the glitzy cultural center of a modern country, but the Tel Aviv in the film is not an attractive one[.]

Carmeli-Pollak: It was a combination of trying to find a realistic route for the child. If someone knows the area, they’d say the route was logical. Of course, I could have taken him on a different route. But what also influenced it was my life, and the way I know Tel Aviv. I was an activist in support of African asylum seekers for many years, and most of them live in the areas of Tel Aviv near the old Central Bus Station. It’s there he meets the woman who gives him directions. She’s not wearing a sign saying she’s an asylum speaker but people who know about the situation know she’s one. Before that, he goes through the city of Bnei Brak, and I took him there because I have strong connections to it because my grandparents lived there. I realized there was something deeper about taking this journey through Israel, through a religious Jewish place like Bnei Brak, then as he follows the Palestinian woman and gets on the bus near a place I used to work. Whenever I walked through this area, I thought how unpleasant it was to be there, so I thought this was a good place for the child to go.

Cineaste: What was the casting process on the Palestinian and the Jewish side? Were these nonprofessionals?

Carmeli-Pollak: Of course, looking for the main character, the boy, was the most important thing, while the other parts, those he meets on the journey, were minor, people who were there for only one scene. I looked for the child for some time, but didn’t find anyone right for the part. I didn’t know any actors that age. Then someone told me about a kick-boxing class in a Palestinian city in Israel. I went there and all the kids were like twelve-years-old. A soon as I got there, I had this intuition that I’d find the actor to play the kid. I came with a camera and had prepared myself well, because I wanted to be very precise when talking to them and to be focused on the technical part of it. Of course, the audition was in Arabic because none of them spoke Hebrew, which surprised me, since knowing the Hebrew language is something Palestinians need within Israel. There was one kid who was handsome and had a lot of confidence; he’d say during the audition that he wanted to do the scene again. When I got home, I watched the auditions and I noticed him and realized he was talented, so I decided it’d be him.

Cineaste: And the rest of the cast?

Pollak: His friend was from the kick-boxing class, and all the other kids were nonprofessionals. The father is a professional actor, quite well-known. He can express emotions with his body, his gestures. I didn’t dare audition him. We had a meeting between him and the child, and I did this scene with them, and I thought, “Wow! This is brilliant.” The other parts were a mix of professional and nonprofessional. They were people I know and I felt like, “Okay, they’re not actors, but they’ll know how to do it.”

Cineaste: Though The Sea has a very strong message, it’s not by any measure an obviously militant film. It’s got a certain gentle humanism about it. How surprised were you that it got such a powerfully negative reaction from the government?

Carmeli-Pollak: I need to go back in time. We finished it just before October 7. We thought we had done a good job; an international film company took it on to distribute it. We thought we were on the right track. Then the war started and we thought no one will want to watch this film now. Even though as a filmmaker you usually feel like your film is everything. At that time, however, I thought it was secondary. It took us a long time to decide to start trying to move the film again. The distributor that had taken it on hadn’t managed to sell it because it was financed with Israeli government funds, so they returned it to us. When we put it up for the Ophirs, I felt optimistic, but the producer said let’s just make one print, because no one will vote for it. When we had screenings for members of the Israel Academy, very few people came, but those who did loved it. They told other people and word of mouth was positive. Then there was a big screening at the Jerusalem Film Festival, and the response was emotional, so I thought, “Okay, the film does influence people.” Then we thought we had a chance. At that time, the atrocities in Gaza were happening, so people could watch the film in a theater in Tel Aviv and shed a tear.

But I wasn’t that surprised by the government’s reaction, because there’s no connection between what the film is and what the minister said. If you know politics in Israel, it’s a government that’s simply fascist, and they don’t even hide it—they’re proud of it. The minister feels like he has to say something every day on social media. But even more, he’s doing everything to narrow freedom of speech in Israel in general; not just cinema but also TV. Cinema has been under attack in Israel for years; I’m not the first filmmaker to be attacked. There are political documentaries whose politics are up front and the minister demanded the money they were given back. This is part of a wider move, which includes changing the rules of how films are supported by the Film Fund, so that films like this won’t be made. In this political atmosphere, the reaction wasn’t surprising at all.

Mitchell Abidor is author of a new biography of writer, historian, and revolutionary Victor Serge published by Pluto Press.

The Sea is distributed in the United States by Menemsha Films.

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